Pistols or Rifle?

Trying to figure out which will be better. Pistol has more conditions which seems nice but i see alot of people saying that rifle is better with kits, eg, flamethrower,grenades ect.
Oh, and kit engineer or melee thief for pve viability?, dungeons/leveling ect.. possibly with a ele or a warrior

Different builds require different stat balances. Rifle turret tends towards power, while nades and flamethrower can go either way but are better in my opinion with condition builds. Also, you can mix between condition and power, but you have to be really careful about how you mix the two, since otherwise you end up with low power damage and gimped conditions, or potentialy decent on both but really squishy.

Pistols feel far superior early on, because burning damage is just so great and even confusion from 3 and 4 does alot of damage, but as you get more crit and power on your gear the rifle just starts doing so much more burst and will prob pull ahead

I enjoy rifle much more. With pistols I miss crowd control. Overcharge is extremely useful vs. Powerful enemies. Also net shot is very useful. Also in events where you have to stop someone from escaping. You have AoE effects with every skill except net shot too(piercing with skill 1). Jump shot deals huge damage when standing right next to a group of mobs.

Also, one minor thing to note. Even if you don't like using the rifle, it's always good to have one in your bag so you can use jump shot. If you plan on doing any jumping puzzles, the rifle's #5 ability, Jump Shot is a good way to make some tricky jumps.

Hehe, in the end it boils down to personal preference... Often with pistol I think "damn, I wish I could knock back these guys " whereas you miss the blinds with the rifle... I probably need some more days or weeks to draw a final conclusion.

Hehe, in the end it boils down to personal preference... Often with pistol I think "damn, I wish I could knock back these guys " whereas you miss the blinds with the rifle... I probably need some more days or weeks to draw a final conclusion.

Well, how effective is that trait that causes crits on the rifle to blind? - the only thign you'd be losing then is AoE crowd control; throw in a flame thrower and you've got an AoE knockback/blind back

Flamethrower is much more viable as a power/crit weapon then it is with cond dmg. Not saying cond dmg build wont work though. Rifle offers more CC then pistols and its CC is pretty quick. Offers really good AoE dmg in right conditions (#1 pierces in a line, #3 hits targets in a small cone, #5 hits all in jump/landing areas.)

With a cond dmg build pistols do insane dmg as well, but with abundance of cond dmg builds in betas, a lot of people run builds that have con removal (my ft build uses 3 elixirs, each able to clear all conds). Shield, like another poster said, offers a lot of variety as well without losing too much in conditions.

After Playing a little, I just like the extra range of the rifle as wells the net and knockback. Just seems like the rifle has better utility for me. Enemies and players get too close for my comfort with pistols (but I don't have rocket boots yet either).

I've been a pistol guy since day 1, but I took a rifle to unlock the skills and I've been having a lot of success in 1v1 and single target dmg with it... seems to me now that Pistol is group/control weapon (great for PVE and some WvW situations) and Rifle is great for single target dmg

At the beginning, I'd say rifle > pistol, and I'm a pistol fan. Pistol builds tend to rely on crit procs, and you just can't get a lot of crit until you're higher level. Rifle builds tend to scale more linearly with no dip at the front end. That and there are plenty of PvE objectives that don't take in conditions at all. Doors, turrets, etc. Not that big of deal in sPvP (or even WvW), but PvE has a lot more stuff like that.

The rifle definitely appears to be more damage, but you also have to realize that you fire your pistol auto shot 5 times fro every 3 of the rifle. The other rifle abilities add more damage then the other pistol ones do, but the pistol gives you a lot more AoE options, while the rifle offers a lot of control.

I honestly feel they are well balanced, and it is a matter of personal preference.

Quick question about Sigils. If you go Pistol/Pistol or Pistol/Shield you can slot sigils in the Maind hand and Off Hand, but if you go rifle you can only slot one? In other games I've played, weapons that are considered "2 Handed" have two modification slots to make up for being able to slot items in Main Hand and Off Hand weapon choices. Am I missing something here?

Rifle only has one sigil slot. But the sigils early on are so weak I wouldn't bother.

As everyone can see it is totally up to personal flavour what weapon you take. I consider them very well balanced and each one shines in other situations. Just make sure to go the condition damage route with pistols and power with rifle. precision is good for both, even though early on, when you don't have a lot of burn/bleed on crit traits or sigils, precision is a little weaker on pistols.

Another thing to note for everyone going pistols: Runes etc that grant you +% bleed/burn/poison or whatever duration are highly useless early on. This is because damaging conditions only tick every full second. So if all you got is +10% poison duration for example and apply a 3 second poison it will do nothing - no additional damage.

And last: the flamethrower is indeed strong for both cond and powerbuilds. you just use it differently. With power you use the #1 & #2 skills for massive aoe damage. condition builds love the inc. ammo toolbelt skill and the flamewall (put it up and shoot through it). knockback and smoke are good utility for both obviously.

I think that is intentional to somewhat balance out the generally lower damage of 1h?

I played the first day in sPvP with Rifle & POW build, and didn't have much luck with it.

Last night I went back to Pistol/Shield and a much higher focus on condi-damage, which also took me from ~26k health down to ~19k, but I had a much better time. For some reason it felt like I had more survivability and I felt that in 1v1s the pistol was outperforming the Rifle. Not sure why, I just feel it usually does more DPS for me, mostly due to conditions. (Maybe I just faced more scrubs last night too! )

I'm playing Grenadier with Pistol/Shields, using Elixir S & Slick Shoes, and I was very tough to kill even by multiples.

I had a blast. The Rifle is just not working for how I play I guess, I see others doing better with it then I was able to. /shrug